Amsterdam Centre for Urban History

2 PhD positions "Gender and urban space"

7 October 2016

The Amsterdam School of Historical Studies (ASH), one of the six research schools of the Faculty of Humanities, currently has two vacant PhD positions as part of the NWO-funded VIDI Project The freedom of the streets. Gender and urban space in Europe and Asia (1600-1850), led by Dr Danielle van den Heuvel.

The two PhD projects are part of four closely-related projects, which together aim to systematically analyse the gendering of urban space in pre-modern Asia and Europe. It is widely held that between 1600 and 1850, women gradually withdrew from the public sphere of the street and moved to the private sphere of the home. This powerful narrative, linked to theories of modernisation, has created a conceptual stranglehold that sees public space as exclusively male and private space as entirely female, thereby obscuring the actual workings of gender in pre-industrial urban societies.

Based on extensive visual and textual sources, two PhD projects will provide in-depth studies of Edo and Amsterdam, two major pre-modern cities with distinct cultures, architecture, and governance. One postdoctoral project digitally visualises gendered movement in these two cities, thereby providing a complementary spatial analysis, as well as an important tool to engage with wider audiences. Building on the work of the PhD candidates and Postdoctoral researcher, the Principal Investigator will analyse how the access of women to pre-industrial streets was shaped in contrasting European and Asian urban communities.